LSU women's basketball coach Van Chancellor will be formally inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend, and the famously glib and charismatic speaker said he's worried about being tongue-tied.

Chancellor joins a distinguished class of coaches entering the Hall that includes North Carolina coach Roy Williams and Phil Jackson, who won 9 NBA championships guiding the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers.

In Baton Rouge on Tuesday, Chancellor noted he was speaking without notes.

"But you can be sure I'll have some notes with me Friday night," he said. He joked that LSU assistant head coach Bob Starkey, who is as admittedly taciturn and Chancellor is garrulous, wrote a speech for him.

Chancellor and Williams are close personal friends who recently golfed together at Pebble Beach. But the pair shares more than an affinity for the links; both also grew up dirt poor in the rural South and found basketball as their ticket out of misery.

"When I was growing up I wasn't thinking about the Hall of Fame, I was just trying to survive," Chancellor said, referring to his boyhood days picking cotton in Mississippi.

As a head coach, Chancellor won 439 games in 19 years at Ole Miss, then went on to win four WNBA championships with the Houston Comets and lead the women's team to the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics. He was named head coach at LSU this year after the abrupt departure of Pokey Chatman, who resigned over allegations she engaged in improper sexual relationships with former players.